no frame buffer on FC1

[Greg Matheson]

I am trying to set up a CJK-capable fbiterm on the console, but I
can't open the frame buffer.

There is no /dev/fb device.

root at momotaro /home/greg
$ ls -l /dev/fb*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            3 Apr 28 21:12 /dev/fb-> fb0
crw-------    1 root     root      29,   0 Sep 15  2003 /dev/fb0

root at momotaro /home/greg
$less -f /dev/fb0
/dev/fb0: No such device

I have a Sis 6326 AGP TruColor Graphics Accelerator card, for
BIOS 1.26, which supports Vesa BIOS Ex 2.0, but on a cursory google
search couldn't see any messages anywhere about frame buffer problems
with this card.

The card does not appear to come up when I run dmesg.

One linuxquestions message about frame buffer opening/existing
problems said vga should/could be defined in grub.conf, but
setting it to vga=788, or vga=791 doesn't solve the problem.

This is all pretty low level stuff, and I'm over my head. 

Here is what a frame buffer is:

http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/FrameBuffer.html#99

The CJK people seem to be doing at a hardware level what can't be
done at a software level. Correct me if this characterization is
wrong.

Do I have to reinstall, and try harder to get the monitor right?

-- 
Greg Matheson, Taiwan